05 April 2010

Sketch of a Phylogenetic Query Language

In some ways this works out to be a bit like a query language. You can use it to set up data constructs, and then search them for groups of interest. For example, suppose you wanted a list of all stem-humans from Kenya. Assuming that your dataset included 1) a taxonomic unit called Homo sapiens, 2) a group called extant for all extant taxonomic units, and 3) a group called Kenya for all Kenyan taxonomic units, that query might look like this:

MathML is great for being flexible and extensible enough to cover concepts like this. But ... it's also really verbose. This is fine for my purposes so far, but it may be cumbersome for other purposes. So I've been playing around with a more succinct way to write these expressions. Today I tossed up some rough ideas here: